Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development

§ 1. In close connexion with that stage of development of the myth-producing faculty which is inaugurated by the beginnings of agricultural life, is found a natural consequence of the solar myth among agriculturists—the Myth of Civilisation.

We have seen that the advance in civilisation from the nomad life to the agricultural stage is accompanied by that inversion of the direction of the myth which puts the Sun in the foreground and allows a tone favourable to him to prevail in it, whereas at the nomad stage it was the night-sky and the phenomena of nature connected with it that engrossed the sympathy of the formers of myths. Now here we again encounter a remarkable phenomenon. No intricate psychological foundation or historical demonstration is required to prove that our own stage of civilisation—and not ours alone—is intellectually qualified to compare itself either with a lower stage through which it has long since passed, or with a higher which is now only beginning to be aimed at by our best spirits,—so as to estimate its value from the point of view given us by our social system. For let two different stages of civilisation, social systems or conditions be brought before any man’s observation so that he notes their essential difference, and the perception of this difference will awaken an impulse to measure them off against one another and form a judgment on the perfection of the one and the insufficiency of the other.

And not only does the man who has reached the higher stage feel himself impelled to compare his new condition with that of those who remain behind on the less perfect stage already passed by him; but also those who stand on the lower stage, but are acquainted with the altered mode of life of others, contemplate the advanced stage and set off its value against that of the stage on which they still stand. Thus we have seen above that huntsmen and fishermen have their ideas about agricultural life. Still he who has reached the higher stage will be more generally impelled to such meditations than those who still stand on the lower. When the question has arisen in his mind, it must finally culminate in the enquiry, What was the origin or who was the author of the great advance which procures for him such advantages over one who stands lower? It is true, the agriculturist is not always conscious that his stage of civilisation is the result of an advance at all; for in many nations there exists no consciousness that any less perfect stage preceded that of the agriculturist. But this consciousness is not a necessary condition of the raising of the question; the mere observation of the difference between the two stages of civilisation suffices to prompt it. And it will come more and more into the foreground when the gradual progress within the limits of the agricultural stage has advanced so far as to develop the social consequences of the new state in all their fulness.

Social order and laws are non-existent for the nomad, who has not yet formed for himself any permanent social system. At his stage they are not merely superfluous, but even in a certain sense inconceivable. The wranglings, the objects of which are chiefly wells and pastures, are settled and composed, not by laws and rights established once for all, but by strength of arm, or between disputants of peaceful disposition by separation: ‘And there arose strife between the herdsmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdsmen of Lot’s cattle. And Abram said to Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, between my herdsmen and thy herdsmen; for we are brethren. Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: if thou goest to the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou goest to the right hand, then I will go to the left’ (Gen. XIII. 7–9).[548] And on occasion of a dispute about a well, Abimelech said to Isaac: ‘Go from us; for thou art much mightier than we. And Isaac departed thence, and pitched his tent in the valley of Gerar, and dwelt there’ (Gen. XXVI. 16, 17). Arts, manufactures and other occupations are inconceivable at this stage; for the wants of the nomad are so limited that the conditions of his existence are satisfied by his tents, herds, and pasture-ground.

The answer which the agriculturist gives to the question about the origin of the arts and manufactures, of social order and law, all of them products of agricultural life, is what we call the Myth of Civilisation. This Myth of Civilisation, which we encounter among the most various nations, refers the authorship of the advanced and refined state of civilisation to the Solar figures of the myth, which, to the prejudice of the figures of the dark sky, are brought into the foreground by the human mind on its advance to agriculture. It is therefore a spontaneous act of the human mind that is made the cause of a series of phenomena, of which it is itself really the result.

The Greek and Roman mythology abounds with data verifying the Solar character of the stories of the origin of civilisation and morals. Arts and manufactures are constantly brought into connexion with mythical names which are recognised by comparative philologists as designations of the Sun. Not only the musician but the smith of Olympus are Solar figures; so also the first navigator and founder of cities. The right understanding of Mythology was long hindered by the so-called Euhemeristic system, which assumed that the gods of mythology, and especially of the Greek and Roman mythology (for scarcely any others were sufficiently known to be considered), were only great benefactors of humanity, who after their death were rewarded by divine honours; and this system has been maintained till the present day. The Myth of Civilisation consequently had to be fitted into the frame of this convenient system. It was said that posterity had from mere Gratitude raised the inventor of the arts to the throne of deity. Petrarch says, ‘We know that the founders of some arts after their death were rewarded by divine honours, rather from grateful than from pious feelings ... Thus Apollo was made a god through his lyre, Apollo and Aesculapius through medicine, Saturn, Liber and Ceres through agriculture, Vulcan through his smithy.’[549] This mode of regarding the subject was not only upheld from Euhemerus down to Petrarch, but exerted its influence on the interpretation of the ancient stories even to our own times.

However, the consideration of the store of legends of humanity in general, as far as they are brought under our ken, collected and analysed according to their historical and psychological truths, teaches us that the founder of all the order and morality which result from the more civilised agricultural life is, in the language of the old stories, the Sun. The so-called Myths of Civilisation are always put into connexion with the Sun, or with some of the copious synonyms which mythology gives to the Sun. These myths must exist in every nation which has won its upward way from nomadism to agriculture, or from tribal life to society. As soon as the agriculturist began to use the ploughshare, he could not but observe the difference between his life and that of the nomad, who fixed his tent-plugs in the earth at a different place from day to day, moving from pasture to pasture, whilst he himself had the control of permanent dwellings, protected by definite unalterable laws, and lived a life of regularity, yet full of enjoyment and variety, strongly contrasting with the Bedawî’s monotonous independence. Then, when the source of this difference was sought, all the advance was attributed to the Sun, as the author and encourager of agriculture and inventor of the more refined arts and enjoyments of life. Moreover, the connexion which the Myth of Civilisation establishes between the Founder of cities and the Wolf, as e.g. between Romulus and a she-wolf who suckled him, has lately been explained by Prof.

Sepp through the signification given to the wolf in the solar myth—with perfect justice, though perhaps going rather too far in the elaboration of details.[550] Like Apollo, Osiris also is γεωργίας εὑρετὴς, Μουσῦν μαθητής, ‘Inventor of agriculture and teacher of the arts;’[551] and in this point the myths of nations quite distinct in race agree. A few examples taken from sources wide apart will make this clear.

One of the Solar heroes of the Persian myth of civilisation is Jemshîd, whose character can scarcely be doubtful to the mythologist, after the consentaneous characteristics with which the epic poet Firdôsî and the historian Mirchond fill up the description of his life.[552] His very name indicates clearly enough a solar signification; and to this must be added the fact that he combines many characteristics of the solar supporters of the Myth of Civilisation. He first gives to Irân, till then savage, the benefits of civilisation. He is the first builder of cities, the inventor of the fine arts, especially of music, navigation (which belongs especially to the solar myth, as we have seen), and, as Mirchond explains at length, of the cultivation of the vine—an Iranian Noah. He divides the whole nation into four classes: Scribes, Warriors, Agriculturists, and Artists. Thus it is he who puts an end to the nomadic tribal life. In this breaking up into castes not the slightest trace is discoverable of any notice of pastoral life; on the contrary, in the story of Jemshîd as worked out by the later narrator, probably in close agreement with the still living mythical tradition, especial weight is laid on Agriculture. The solar chronology is also due to Jemshîd. Mirchond says: ‘As often as the Chosrev of the stars, the Sun, took away the royal robe of rays from the fish’s tail and threw it on the neck of the ram, Jemshîd appointed an assemblage of the great and noble at the foot of the throne.

He instituted all the appliances of pleasure, and spread out the carpet of joy, and called the day Neurûz.’ The Prometheus-side of the Jemshîd-story is surprising. The Persian hero of civilisation, like the Greek, is chastised and hurled down by God for his presumption; his fall is occasioned by Zohak, who conquers him, from whose shoulders dragons grow up (the dragons of the Storm and the Night). After a fall of a hundred years he appears on the coast of the Chinese sea. The Sun is devoured by the monster waiting for him at the bottom of the sea, but afterwards rises again out of the sea, like Jonah in the Hebrew myth.

If now we turn from ancient Irân to the American tribes, we find the Myth of Civilisation take the same direction. There also the origin of morals, law and order is attributed to the Sun. I quote one of the numerous myths of civilisation from J.G. Müller, who deserves great credit for his work on American religions, which makes American mythology known in Germany. It is the myth of civilisation belonging to the Muyscas, inhabitants of the Terra Firma in the plain of Bogotà, who tell as follows of the commencement of civilisation among themselves: ‘In the earliest times, before the moon was, the high plain of Cundinamarca was closed in and the pass of Tequendama not yet opened. Then the Muyscas people were savage, without agriculture, without religion, without morals, without civil rule. Then there appeared a bearded old man who came from the East, who had three names, Bochica, Nenequetheba, and Zuhé, and was represented as having three heads. He taught the savages to wear clothes, to till the land, to worship the gods, to form states. His wife had also three names, Huythaca, Chia, Yubecayguaya. She was dazzlingly beautiful, but so malicious that she plotted to destroy all her husband’s salutary undertakings. And she actually succeeded by secret magic arts, in causing the Funzha (now Rio Bogotà), the river of the country, to rise to such a height as to overwhelm the whole high plain with flood. Only a minority of the inhabitants were able to escape to the summits of the mountains.

But then the just wrath of Bochica was kindled; he drove the wicked woman off the earth for ever, and changed her into the Moon. Since then there has been a moon. And to get rid of the troubles of the earth, Bochica made an opening in the wall of rock, and allowed the water to run off by the majestic waterfall of Tequendama, 570 feet high. When the land was thus dried, the people that were left were called to civilisation, and the Solar worship was introduced, with a sacerdotal order, periodical feasts, sacrifices and pilgrimages. At the head of the state Bochica set a secular and a sacerdotal chief, settled the chronology, and after a life of two thousand years at length withdrew, bearing the name Idacanzas.’[553]

So much for the Myth of Civilisation. It is certainly wrong to try to find matter of history in these stories of civilisation, and, with Markham, Rivero, and Tschudi, to see in Bochica and the other bearded heroes of civilisation belonging to American mythology ‘missionaries of the worship of Brahma, of Buddha, and probably of other sects.’[554] My readers will surely perceive the perverseness of such a proceeding. J.G. Müller himself recognised the Sun in Bochica, the civiliser of the Muyscas; but he did not find out all the mythological relations which determine his solar character. The most important of these is the circumstance that Bochica is ‘a bearded old man, who came from the East.’ Here then, as in other American myths, the Sun’s rays are regarded as the long white beard of the old man of the sun, in the same sense in which they appear elsewhere under the form of locks of hair (see supra, p. 137). And as in Egyptian the rising sun has a different name from the setting, and the same distinction of name is stamped upon the Hebrew myth also (Leah and Delilah on the one side, and Dinah, Zilpah, Asher, etc. on the other), so in the myth of the Muyscas the three names of the Sun refer to his various positions at rising, noon, and setting, which probably played a part in the ancient myth of the Muyscas. The corresponding three faces of the Sun express the same idea that produced the myth of the two of Janus (see p. 137); with the difference that the American myth notices three phases of the Sun, and the Roman only two.

The Sun is opposed by the Moon, the sky of day is engaged in an everlasting war with the sky of night. The circumstance that the moon causes the flood exactly agrees with the American conception, which connects water with the moon.[555] The moon also is provided with three names in our American myth, and these three names have the same signification as the three of the Sun, i.e. the conception that each of the varying phases of the moon is itself an independent object. Dr. Anton Henne, a Swiss mythologist, first considered the meaning of the three visible forms of the moon (as contrasted with the four astronomical phases) in mythology, especially German, and cited some parallels from classical mythology.[556] Now although this feature of the triple form of the moon is undoubtedly expressed in many myths, among others in the American one under review, yet Henne-Am-Rhyn seems to go rather too far, in referring the many variations of the German story of the three spinning girls and so forth to this mythical idea. Many of these variants bear the undeniable impress of a mythical description of the setting Sun’s or the Night’s battle with the bright Sun of day; especially that in which one of the Sisters is quite white, the second half-white and half-black, and the third blind.

Unquestionably the Sun of day is the quite white sister; the Sun shortly before setting the half-white and half-black; and the Night the blind one (see supra, pp. 109–10).[557] The solar character of the princess Märthöll (no. 586, Henne-Am-Rhyn), who is as beautiful as the sun, and can only weep golden tears (see Excursus E), can escape no one.

The moon-lit sky of night appears in the Myth of Civilisation averse to all the blessings which the Sun grants to the agriculturist. In this character it appears frequently, especially in the American mythology;[558] whereas in the Oriental the connexion between the moon and water suggests the idea that the moon produces fertility and freshness in the soil (see supra, p. 160). In the Voguls’ story of civilisation, a small fragment of which, from the collections made by Antony Reguly, is contained in the important work of the Hungarian Academician Paul Hunfalvy on the ‘Country and People of the Voguls,’[559] Kulyater is the builder of the first city. The solar character of Kulyater cannot be doubted, if the following portion of the Vogul story be taken into consideration: ‘He dwelt in a house locked with seven iron locks. Tarom was angry with him, and seized him by one foot, and he fell into the heart of the foaming sea.’ This is the sunset. The reason why the Founder of Cities (whom the Vogul reckons among the evil spirits and regards as the originator of death[560]) appears here in an unfavourable light is the same as that which we shall discover for the tone of dislike which the Hebrew story adopts towards the agriculturist Cain. Till they became Russified the Voguls remained prevailingly a hunting people, and their myths did not rise to the elevation of the view of the world possessed by agriculturists. The Vogul story of the Creation[561] reflects exactly the ideas of a hunting and fishing people; it speaks only of the chase and of catching fish.

Now we have seen that the Myth of Civilisation expresses the same idea in nations of the most different races. Even in the Japanese myths of civilisation, published by the learned Japanese Dira Kittao,[562] a thoroughly solar character is evident. Manufactures and arts, social order and law are always attributed to the Sun as author, not only by Aryans, but even by the still unclassified American tribes. If the knowledge of the American languages were more advanced than it is in our time, and if the mutual relations of those languages were not ‘exceedingly perplexing, for the same reason as those presented by the Polynesian and African dialects, and in a yet higher degree,’[563] we might gain some understanding of the origin of the many proper names which we encounter in the above myth and in the other members of the copious American mythology; and this would lead us to a far more accurate idea of their origin and life than is possible with petrified myths of civilisation. Nevertheless, before we part from them, we will still just notice that the introduction of social laws, political constitutions and religious institutions such as are ascribed in the Muyscas’ myth to the Sun himself as an old man, is frequently attributed to the sons of the Sun. There is no need to prove that in such stories the sons of the Sun are identical with their father the Sun. So e.g. Orpheus, son of the Sun, calls into cities men living a savage life in the forests, and urges them to a more civilised life. Again, the Indian legislator Vaivasuta is son of the Sun.

And, not to neglect again here American mythology, the two sons of the Sun, Manco Copac and Mama Oello, are brought forward in the Peruvian myth of civilisation as teachers of civilisation. There is no reason whatever to identify Mama Oello with the Moon, as J.G. Müller does;[564] and it would even run counter to the very nature of the Myth of Civilisation. For, as we saw in the previously cited American myth, the Moon is the very power that paralyses the work of the Sun in introducing civilisation and law. To this place belongs also the idea, which is found in many nations, that the founders of their legislation and religion were born from virgins, made to conceive by the Sun’s rays.[565] This element of the solar myth still operates in a story told by the Persian poet Ferîd al-Dîn ʿAṭṭâr, who introduces a maiden’s dream as follows: ‘Then the Christian maiden saw in a dream that a Sun fell into her lap, opened his mouth and said, etc.[566]’

§ 2. The sources of the ancient Hebrew mythology have preserved no less considerable remains of the Hebrew people’s myth of civilisation; and it moves in the same direction as has been indicated above. The invention of arts and manufactures, morals, law, and social order, is attributed to Solar figures. Especially note-worthy in this connexion is the fourth chapter of Genesis, where mention is made of the beginning of the building of cities, and of the invention of agricultural and of musical instruments; and the ninth chapter of the same book, in which the first commencement of social order secured by law is related. All this is attached to names of which other mythical features besides those concerning civilisation are recorded, features which point to their solar significance, and serve to fill up the story of the civilising activity of their bearers.

But the Solar figures are authors not of manufactures and civil order only: the human race itself has the Sun as its author, through whose children mankind is propagated. The name Âdâm, Abû-l-bashar ‘father of all flesh,’ as the Arabs call him, is, as is obvious at a glance, a solar appellation ‘the Red’; etymologically the same word as Edôm. When the Hebrew story of civilisation derives the human race from the Red one, it does the same as the Greeks when they call the mother of mankind Pyrrha ‘the Red.’[567] The Hebrews call the mother of mankind Chawwâ (Eve) ‘the mother of all that lives’ (Gen. III. 29),[568] i.e., ‘the Circulating’ (in Arabic ḥawa V), a name of the Sun, the feminine synonym of Zebhûlûn ‘the Round;’ a very ancient appellation of the Sun, the traces of which we meet also in the Vedas, where (Rigveda, I. 174. 5) the Sun is called a Wheel, or, as he frequently is in other passages, a Chariot. This is based not only on the conception of the Horses of the Sun drawing his chariot, but on the original conception of this chariot, as consisting of a single wheel or of a cylinder on a sloping plain, as Lazarus Geiger has admirably demonstrated.[569]

It is also to be considered that the mythological genealogy of the Hebrews makes the world to be peopled by the descendants of Cain, children of the Sun, and that a second progenitor of the human race, Noah, is likewise a solar figure. We must here of course disregard the late Seth-genealogy, at the time of the drawing up of which even the minimum of mythical conception necessary to the working-out of the Myth of Civilisation had already vanished. It is not impossible that originally two or even more now forgotten versions of the myth of population existed—one which called the first father of the human race Adam, and another which attached the propagation of mankind to the name Noah, and that then, by the interposition of the story of the Flood which made the whole human race perish, the two versions grew into harmony with one another in the popular mind. But in any case it is certain that the Hebrews made Solar figures the ancestors of mankind.

Thus among the Hebrews also it was the Solar myth that answered the question concerning the primeval origin of agricultural civilisation; and thus was completed the picture of what modern interpreters love to call the ‘Origins.’ It is this side of the formation of legends which maintains its life and productiveness longest among men. For there is always a latent instinct and powerful impulse in the mind of man to cancel all notes of interrogation, and to gain and to give intelligence on the origin of all that surrounds him. We well know how many stories are current in the mouth of the people, stories of comparatively modern origin, which have for their subject the rise of rivers, mountains and institutions. How charming are the Hungarian stories invented to explain the origin of the two great rivers which traverse that beautiful country! and who knows not into what petty details this impulse of the human mind pushes its way? It treats nothing as a matter of course and as sufficiently explained by the mere fact of its existence; it finds everywhere a Why and a How, that must be answered. It not only seeks reasons of existence, and dives into cosmogonies, for the overpowering universe of the world and the grander features of it, mountains and seas; but even what distinguishes one being from another—the ox’s horns and the camel’s short ears, the lion’s mane and the black stripes on the ass’s back—it cannot leave unexplained.

It may be affirmed that among the Semites this impulse to explain the origins of things maintained its longest existence as a living power, productive of stories. Even on the subjects on which the Biblical accounts gave information, men did not rest satisfied with these accounts, but allowed free and unlimited scope to stories.[570] A large part, indeed almost the whole, of the Arabian answers to questions concerning the Origins, is a Postislamic product of popular story. All that the Arabs learned on the subject from tradition or from stories still in process of formation was collected in works entitled Kutub al-awâʾil, or ‘Libri Principiorum.’ The best known and widest circulated of these, is the Kitâb al-awâʾil, written by Jelâl al-Dîn al-Suyûṭî, a voluminous writer of the tenth Mohammedan century, a part of which was published by Professor Richard Gosche, with an instructive introduction on literary history.[571] In former times it was so extensively circulated in the East that a revised version was also prepared, which was everywhere copied even before the clean copy (tabyîḍ) was made.[572] But several hundred years before al-Suyûṭî, an Andalusian scholar, Tâj al-Dîn b. Ḥammûyâ al-Sarachshî (born A.H. 576) had written a work in eight volumes on the Origins of Things; and I believe that this work, of which the classic historian of the Moors in Spain[573] gives an account, is the most extensive of its kind.

In the above-quoted work, Gosche maintains the view that the whole Sêpher tôledôth, which is familiar to us as one of the original elements of which the composite Book of Genesis consists, was mainly concerned with these ‘Origins,’ and is the Hebrew representative of the copious Awâʾil literature of the Arabs. But we cannot admit this, when we consider that this book of sources, to judge from its known fragments, has rather a genealogical character, and, though containing the myths of civilisation, does not embrace the cosmogony, which is of a decidedly later origin. Therefore, if we must at any price find an analogy in Arabic literature to the Sêpher tôledôth, we ought rather to look to the many works composing the copious genealogical literature of the Arabs, called Kutub al-ansâb.[574]

§ 3. In regard to the Hebrew myths of civilisation we must pay attention to another circumstance; to do which we must again go back to what has been said above on the phases of development of the myths. In determining the amount of mythical matter which was worked out in any period of development of human civilisation, we must not, as was fully explained above, start from the materials and the elements employed in the myths in question, so much as from the direction or tendency of the myth and the general ideas which prevail in it. But yet this view requires some qualification, insofar as the designation of some human occupation is employed in the phraseology of the myth. I mention this with especial reference to the name Ḳayin (Cain), which denotes Smith.[575] It is obvious that this manufacture must have already existed in society before such a name could come to be employed in a myth. But, on the other hand, the myth of the war of the Sun with the Cloud or the Wind cannot have so recent an origin. We must accordingly concede to the Myth of Civilisation an influence upon the form of the mythic matter—an influence which not only produced an alteration in the tendency of the myth, but also introduced new names and figures, which, as is evident from the linguistic meaning of the names themselves, arose at the stage of conscious civilisation.

The story of the murder of Abel belongs, no doubt, to the primitive myths which were already formed at the nomadic stage; a solar name must have been given to his murderer, just as in the dialectic variant of Hebhel (Abel), namely, Yâbhâl (Jabal), his father Lemekh (Lemech) is named as the murderer. Later, at the stage of the Myth of Civilisation, the murderer of Abel is called Ḳayin (Cain), the smith and inventor of agricultural implements, whose name is indeed also a solar appellation, but one that already belonged to the Myth of Civilisation. The same case occurs in the story of Jacob. Originally, in the nomadic myth, Jacob’s hostile brother was called Edôm, the Red, the Sun. For this name the Myth of Civilisation substituted ʿÊsâv (if we explain this as the Worker, the Accomplisher; see p. 139);—again a name which is essentially solar, but could arise only with the Myth of Civilisation.

In this wise the Myth of Civilisation, starting from the general ideas of the agriculturist, opened a wider circle of vision in the notions held of the Sun, and with the new enlarged circle created new names for the Sun, which then drove into obscurity some older appellations belonging to the primitive form of the myth.

§ 4. Before we conclude our diagnosis of the Myth of Civilisation, we will cast a momentary glance at the forms in which this group of myths shows itself in other Semitic nations. The founder of civilisation in the Assyrian and Babylonian myth is the Oannes of Berosus. ‘During the daytime Oannes held intercourse with men, taught them sciences and arts, the building of cities and temples, laws and the introduction of the measurement of planes; further, he showed them how to sow and reap: in a word, he instructed them in everything necessary to social life, so that after his time they had nothing new to learn.’ In a word, Oannes is the teacher of civilisation and inventor of all art and sciences, all law and order. That this founder of civilisation has a solar character, like similar heroes in all other nations, is shown in the very next words of Berosus: ‘But when the Sun set, Oannes fell into the sea, where he used to pass the night.’ Here evidently only the Sun can be meant, who in the evening dips into the sea, and comes forth again in the morning and passes the day on the dry land in the company of men. He is half fish half man, and in this respect identical with the Canaanitish Dâgôn, whose name denotes ‘Fish.’ Dâgôn also is, with the Assyrians as well as with the Canaanites, the god of fertility of the soil and founder of civilisation.

He is ‘Inventor of the plough, distributor of grain, protector of the cornfield;’ and in Assyria we find him represented with his head covered by a horned cap.[576] The combination of the two characters is to be explained, not by supposing that the idea of the god of fertility was connected with that of the rapid propagation of the fish, but by the solar meaning given in mythology to the fish. It must not be overlooked that in this connexion the fish is always spoken of as rising out of the water—like the Sun, who, having passed the night in the water, issues forth again in the morning.

We see the same also in the extant Phenician myth of civilisation, which is narrated by the Sanchuniathon of Philo Herennius. Perverted and spoiled as the stories of the Phenicians may have been by the pen of the Greek author, who contemplated Phenician mythology through the medium of the Greek cosmogony, corrupted and Hellenised as the proper names especially are, yet these pieces of information are undoubtedly based on real stories which were current among the Phenicians. It is a pity to lavish on them so much profound thought and symbolising combination as has been done by Bunsen, Movers and many other scholars; but, on the other hand, it is an equal mistake to condemn the entire mass as a useless forgery and declare it unworthy of attention in investigating Phenician antiquity. The real task is rather to penetrate the bewildering labyrinth of misunderstandings to the simple and original. The confirmation given in the last few years by the cuneiform inscriptions to the Babylonica, which are referred to the reports of Berosus, ought to moderate any extreme scepticism on the subject of the Phenician affairs which are quoted from Sanchuniathon, Mochus and others.

The Phenician Cosmogony of Philo Herennius says that Chrysoros, who as the Opener, Navigator, and Smith has already appeared to us (pp. 98–9) to have a Solar character, was the progenitor of Ἄγρος or Ἀγροτής and Ἀγρύηρος, and says of these, ‘From them are derived the agriculturists and those who hunt with dogs. These latter are also called Ἀλῆται, or Wanderers to and fro. From them are derived Ἄμυνος and Μάγος, who taught men how to found villages and feed herds.’ This is only the Myth of Civilisation of the agriculturist again, which everywhere brings the commencement of agriculture, the foundation of cities and civilisation, into connexion with the Sun. As from Cain is descended Enoch, whose name is attached to the first city in the world, so from Chrysoros, the Phenician Cain, are derived those who first adapted their places of sojourn to the requirements of settled dwellings. In a word, the genealogy only asserts that the Sun occasions the choice of fixed dwellings and consequently of agricultural life. But the fact that the hunting and nomadic life[577] is introduced together with the origin of agriculture, and that the first commencement of the one is put into combination with the founders of the other, occasions some difficulty, which cannot be simply denied and put aside.

Now it is certainly possible that the Myth of Civilisation among the Phenicians, in whose neighbourhood alongside of agricultural life nomadic life also was in full force—for their view extended over all Palestine and the valley of the Jordan—referred the origin even of the latter mode of life to the Sun, as the founder of all social life. But it is also possible that what Philo asserts on a Phenician authority concerning nomads and hunters is founded on a misunderstanding of the original information. For the sons of Chrysoros, the Sun, were evidently described as hunters and wanderers. Now Hunter and Wanderer are, as we have seen, attributes of the Sun, who shoots his rays at the monster of the storm, and is ‘a fugitive and a vagabond,’ engaged in a migration from east to west. Cain is an exile and wanderer, but not a nomad. But through misunderstanding the Solar hunter and wanderer may have been converted into the founder of the hunting and nomadic life. Even Bunsen, though starting from a different point of view and influenced by other considerations, designated this very passage as a perversion of the Phenician account, perpetrated by Philo and perfectly in accord with the system followed by him.[578] The original Phenician account must, no doubt, have been different.

§ 5. Although Cain and Esau cannot possibly have been incorporated with the old Hebrew mythology till the myth of the origin of civilisation was unfolded, yet they retain the mischievous and hostile character which the nomadic myth always assigns to solar figures. This fact illustrates the general observation which I made above (see p. 81) with especial reference to the Hebrews and Arabs—that in many nations the consciousness of an advance in passing on to the agricultural life is never aroused, or only very late, and that they rather regard this advance as retrogression and look back on the nomadic state as a more perfect one. Among the Hebrews, accordingly, the heroes of civilising agriculture, with the exception of Noah, take a position in the myth far less influential than similar heroes in other nations. The sympathetic light in which Noah was regarded is closely connected with his position in the story of the Deluge, which was added at a very late period to the Hebrew series of stories.

To understand this fact, however, we must cast another glance at the oldest stage of Hebrew Religion, at which religion had not yet fully shaken itself free from mythology, but was closely united with it, and only beginning to have a separate form. Whatever be the psychological factors that produce the religious tendency in man—an attitude of the soul which can no longer be treated as congenital,—it must be regarded as established and certain that the psychological process of the origin of religion, a process influenced only in its most advanced stages by ethical and esthetic forces, is in the first instance developed out of the older mental activity which resulted in the creation of myths. After the exhaustion of the mental activity that forms myths, which is equivalent to the disappearance both of mythical productiveness and of vivid understanding of myths, men have no longer any consciousness of what may be called the etymology of the myth. Then the mythical figures begin to be individualised; and parallel with this process runs the linguistic phenomenon that polyonymy disappears and all the phases of meaning previously expressed by separate names are combined in one or a few. The various synonyms for Sun, Darkness, etc., which existed in the myth, lose their significance; the different names for these natural phenomena, in each of which one feature or element of them was expressed in language, succumb to one single name, which then comprises in itself all their features and elements.

The names Helios and Shemesh take the place of all other designations created in myths for the phenomenon of the Sun. These other designations, e.g. on Hebrew ground Jephthah, Asher, Edom and others, forfeit the signification which they originally had when myths were formed, and instead thereof are individualised. These names become personal names, and the stories of which they are the subjects become events of society. Thus from physical stories arise stories of gods and heroes; thus the nomenclature of the Sun and the Darkness produces a host of names of gods and heroes. For the personages who are thus imagined are powerful celestials, and the forgotten processes of which the myth spoke preserve for some time their heavenly scene of action.

This process of transformation of myths is inevitable, because bound up with the laws of development of the human mind and human speech; at a certain stage of the development of mind and language, the myth must become theology. But the process is gradual, so that the commencing stages of theological development do not break loose at once from the mythical consciousness, and the latter loses its colour gradually before it disappears altogether. A stage of this kind, at which Myth is turning into Religion, is most clearly exhibited by the Myth of Civilisation. Some bit of divine nature or peculiar personality always cleaves to the hero of civilisation; and some such myths actually live long unimpaired after the greater number have been metamorphosed into theology or religion. Thus, for instance, among the Hebrews the origin of religion is to be traced in its germ as far back as the nomadic age. Even at that stage, though of course towards the end of it, we observe the Hebrew myth of the beneficent sky of night and rain turning into religion. For a searching investigation of the religion of the nomadic Hebrews proves the object of their veneration to have been the dark overcast sky, connected (where it is not distinctly declared) with mythical figures of undoubtedly nocturnal character. I must briefly refer to what was indicated above (pp. 72, 73) of the worship of the night-sky and the rain among the Arabs.

The religious stage of the nomadic Hebrews is still to be recognised in the reminiscences, transmitted by theocratic historians, of that age, which was to them a forty years’ wandering in the desert preceding the conquest of Palestine. To the same stock, as sources for the reconstruction of this religious stage, belong also some accounts contained in the Prophetical books; and they cannot but be considered historically credible—of course in the sense in which such reminiscences must be critically estimated as sources of history. For it is certain that such recollections lived on a very long time in the nations of antiquity, and that, if the special tendency of the reporter be stripped off, they may yield objective matter of history.

Did ye offer unto me sacrifices and offerings in the desert forty years, O house of Israel? Did ye bear the huts [read Sukkôth] of your king, and Kiyyûn (Chiun) your idol, the star [read kôkhâbh], your god whom ye had made to yourselves? (Amos V. 25, 26.)